Singing My Life
by cloverhand
Summary: Anya is the only woman she's never been able to avenge. (Anya/Olaf, Anya/Halfrek, Anya/Xander, Anya/Giles, and Anya/Tara)


This was written for the LJ comm a href=" .com"Womenverse/a, for the Music Inspiration challenge. I had to pick two of the three songs I was assigned, and use them for inspiration for a fanwork. The songs I used were "Breath (2 AM)" by Anna Nalick and "Killing Me Softly With His Song" by Roberta Flack. All italicized lyrics are from one of those two songs.

**Singing My Life (Five Betrayals of Anya Christina Emanuella Jenkins)**

This takes place largely in S6, post "Hell's Bells," with references to S7's "Selfless" and S3's "The Wish." Olaf was Anya's husband, back in the 900's, and Halfrek was Anya's vengeance demon best friend. You probably know who Xander, Giles, and Tara are. I'm not 100% sure why I chose not to write about Anya and Spike, but I guess mostly because when Anya slept with Spike it was, in many ways, an attempt to finally get vengeance on Xander, and, also, because it kind of doesn't fit with the other five as well.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything mentioned in this unofficial fanwork. All characters are the property of Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. The title and the italicized lyrics in the beginning of each ficlet come from the two songs I used for this challenge: "Breath (2 AM)" and "Killing Me Softly With His Song," neither of which I own.

* * *

_I felt he found my letters and read each one out loud._

The memory of Olaf stings like old, heavy vodka in the back of her throat, burning its way through her. Olaf, even just in memory, is the manifestation of humiliation and heartbreak and a bellowing, shrieking rage that she had never unlearned. If she forgets the remembered bitterness of betrayal, she can recall the rush of magic, or _vengeance, _of rising above Olaf and becoming more than just human. Remembering power and blood and immortality hurts in its own way, different and crueler than recalling the first of a millennium of wretched, punished men.

Olaf was humiliating the way an exposed secret was, bitter in the back of her mind years after everyone who could have known had died or forgotten. She had loved him once, when she was named Aud, a hundred lifetimes ago. She can't remember if he loved her, can't recall much about Olaf except for how his smile made her feel like the sun and how he was the first to betray her. Anya, modern human woman, supposes that it doesn't matter, because for as much as he embarrassed her, for as deeply as Aud had hated Olaf for making her just a triviality, Olaf was dead and buried, below six feet of heavy European soil and years immemorial. Olaf and Aud were gone, and Anya didn't need to remember them any more. Anya has a future to think of.

* * *

_You shout 'cause you're just as far in as you'll ever be out_

_And these mistakes you've made, you'll just make them again_

_If you'd only try turning around._

Anya doesn't talk about her history anymore, because the only way to truly tell a story like hers is to etch it into bones or to scrawl it in fresh blood. This is what demons do, but human girls use pens and paper and typewriters, and those aren't instruments with which to share the savage joy of rending flesh and peeling skin. She has memories, so vicious and vivid that they wake her up at night gasping like a drowning woman, but they are not stories she tells anymore. Humans do not like war stories like hers, so Anya keeps them to her self and pretends she hates them too.

In the time before she lost her power, Anyanka whispers these remembered stories to Halfrek under the cover of darkness, and they both delight in the macabre recollections. Halfrek understands this, glories with her in the destruction of men and the laying low of their cities. Halfrek knows her, from centuries of death and murder and bodies twined under the soft sheets of dead men. Halfrek knows her best and her worst and this is a weakness, but Anyanka can't imagine Halfrek betraying her trust. So she clings to Hallie like a bad habit, falling back into her bed every decade of so when she grew bored of her human men.

And then a foolish mortal man destroys her, robs her of her power, and Anyanka is human and mortal. Halfrek doesn't tell her goodbye, she just vanishes like a September frost. Halfrek has no interest in a human Anya, so she leaves her. The last thing she said to Anyanka was "Always."

* * *

_._

* * *

_But, my God, it's so beautiful when the boy smiles._

Xander doesn't treat her well, Anya knows. She doesn't like to remember it, but she knows it's true. Anya has outlived centuries and centuries of Xander ancestors, yet he still treats her like a child, as if she is far too simple to comprehend social mores and customs.

Some days, when he is too busy worrying about Willow and Buffy and Dawn to remember that she is also a fragile, mortal human, she thinks of leaving Xander. She thinks that maybe she'll go back out into the world and find a lover who will treasure her more than this carpenter ever has, but she can't seem to find the will to leave him. Xander is a good man, he is happy and simple and kind, his smile makes her blood rush faster, and he tells her, every night before he falls asleep, that he loves her. Xander asks her to marry him, when the world is teetering dangerously on the brink of collapse, and Anya says yes.

It is because she loves him, loves him with her beating human heart and her loving mortal eyes, that she believes everything will work out. Because she loves him, Anya lets herself forget that humans are silly creatures and men are beasts, that she has learned this in a millennium cursing men for their sins. Secretly, Anya fears that Xander is the same, that he will break her fragile, human heart, but she loves him enough to deny it, to wear a white dress and wait for him at the altar.

And, when Xander never comes to meet her, when she realizes that every fear and insecurity and complaint that she's ever had about Xander is true, she screams and rages and wishes that she could reap bloody, screaming vengeance on him. But she can't, and that hurts as much as his betrayal.

* * *

_He sang as if he knew me in all my dark despair._

_And then he looked right through me as if I wasn't there._

_And he just kept on singing, singing clear and strong._

Anya is not an artist the way the men and women she used to take as lovers were. She does not create and create until everything she knows and thinks and feels is blazed across canvas or carved into stone, immortal. Instead, she destroys. That's her art, tearing things down and making new, terrible shapes, twisting and breaking men with vengeance like a chisel. This is something Xander never understood.

Sometimes, when she remembers how Giles had stood before a magic addled Willow, flush with power, or when she hears half-understood stories about Giles and a man named Ethan and a god named Janus, Anya imagines Giles might understand. Giles is a musician, an artist with his fingers and his words and his guts, but he also knows about the thick, heady joy of destruction. Giles knows how it feels to unmake.

Anya thinks, months after Xander has destroyed her heart in the same way she used to rip men to pieces, that she could fall in love with Giles. Maybe not right away, not while her heart was still sore and purpling with bruises, but maybe one day she could. But then she remembers the day when she was in love with Giles, when she fell in love with him without any memory to tell her not to, and she remembers him shouting and waving plane tickets in her face. Giles didn't stay in Sunnydale for Buffy or for Willow or for Dawn, and Anya can't believe that he would ever come back for her.

* * *

_No one can find the rewind button, girl._

They are the loveless, the lonely, broken hearts, she and Tara. The abused, downtrodden, tragic heroines of every myth and every story told by men. They are just like Dido and Medea, a fallen queen and a runaway witch, but they don't have a pantheon on high to pray to for deliverance. This is all they have in common.

They are each powerful, antiquity's first femme fatale and a witch as pure as earth, but neither of them lift a finger in vengeance. That is how they are different. Tara won't and Anya can't, even though she burns with anger, simmering in her gut like a crucible.

Tara sings sometimes, softly to herself, when she doesn't believe anyone could hear her. Anya can hear but she never says a word, because, if Tara knows, she will shrink away and become _pianissimo, _her voice quieted. Tara is always sad when she sings in her heartbroken voice, and it reminds Anya why she spent centuries falling in love with musicians and artists.

Anya won't ever return to Xander, she promises, and she kisses Tara, so that maybe she can keep Tara from ever going back to Willow.

"Anya, I can't…" Tara murmurs, looking away, and Anya turns her head. Tara goes back to Willow's side, and Anya remembers that, abandoned, Medea became a monster and Dido chose to die before being alone. Anya fears being alone a little more each day.

fin.

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A/N: Please review! I want to know what you thought about this!


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